At no point in this essay have I attempted to argue the historical, representational truth or untruth of any of these many texts' assertions. Without doubt my tentative terms will bear a great deal of refinement; a considerable amount of work remains to be done on distinguishing the numerous influences of mythologies and their attendant rhetorical tropes on the deployment of historical evidence. The two are certainly inseparable – mythologies suffuse evidence, the way the evidence was recorded and has been preserved, and even what we choose to stand as evidence; most of all the way we embed that evidence in narratives of our own.
It may be I am working here with nothing more exciting than a worn tautology: writers from one culture write about another culture; they are very different and we can see this difference in their writing. But in South Africa the inscription of difference has too often been turned to pernicious ends; we need to be intensely aware, I think, not only of what we write, but how.
1.For a more detailed examination of Nathaniel Isaacs's account, for example, see D. Wylie, 'Autobiography as Alibi: History and Projection in Nathaniel Isaacs's Travels and Adventures in Eastern Africa (1836)', Current Writing, 3 (1991), 71–90.
2.Unlike some other disciplines, South African historiography has been generally dilatory in coming to a full awareness of its rhetorical practice. See, for instance, J. Clifford and G. E. Marcus, eds, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Berkeley, 1986; and Paul Atkinson, The Ethnographic Imagination, London, 1990. For a rare South African foray, see C. Saunders, 'Our Past as Literature: Notes on Style in South African History in English', Kleio, 8 (1986) 46–55. For a methodology which could be fruitfully applied in this field, see A. J. Woodman, Rhetoric in Classical Historiography: Four Studies, Portland, 1988.
3.For example, the usual translation of 'Zulu' as 'sky' or 'heavens' can thus be negatively associated with overweening ambition (as in S. Kay, Travels and Researches in Kaffraria, London, 1833, 402), or positively read as 'a proud title, equalled only by the Chinese' (W. Holden, The Past and Future of the Kaffir Races, London, 1866, 8). Similarly, the place-name 'Bulawayo', negatively translated in most works as 'Place of Killing', alluding to Shaka's personal brutality, in a more approbratory account is rendered as ' "The Place of the Ill-Treated Man", for Shaka considered himself to have been much afflicted in former years by ill-treatment and persecution' (T. V. Bulpin, Shaka's Country: A Book of Zululand, Cape Town, 1952, 15). C. L. Miller, Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French, Chicago, 1985, 10–11.
4.W. Wörger, 'Clothing Dry Bones: The Myth of Shaka', Journal of African Studies, 6, 3 (1979), 147. A pioneering but, through neglect, not yet seminal essay.
5.N. Isaacs, Travels and Adventures in Eastern Africa, vol. 1, reprint ed. by L. Hermann, Cape Town, 1936, 264.
6.Isaccs, Travels and Adventures, vol. 1, 45.
7.Isaacs, Travels and Adventures, vol.1, 269.
8.D.C.F. Moodie, The History of the Battles and Adventures of the British, the Boers, and the Zulus vol. 1, Cape Town, 1888, 395; H.F. Fynn, The Diary of Henry Francis Fynn, ed. by J. Stuart and D. McK. Malcolm, Pietermaritzburg, 1950, 12; J.D. Omer-Cooper, The Zulu Aftermath: A Nineteenth-century Revolution in Bantu Africa, London, 1966, adds, without explaining: 'This name which came to be attached to the boy is symbolic of much in his life and character', 29–30.
9.A.T. Bryant, Olden Times in Zululand and Natal, London, 1929, 48. See also V. Ridgway, Stories from Zulu History: Izindaba zakwaZulu, Pietermaritzburg, 1946, 40; S. G. Millin, The King of the Bastards,London, 1950, 125;E.A. Ritter, Shaka Zulu, London, 1955, 1 6 ; J. Michener, The Covenant, New York, 1980, 539; P. J. Schoeman, Pamphata: The Beloved of King Shaka, Cape Town, 1983, 17; W. Faure, director, Shaka Zulu, South African Broadcasting Corporation, Television Series, part 1, 1986; L.B. Hall, Shaka: Warrior King of the Zulu, Cape Town, 1987, 2. To judge by the testimonies in C. de B. Webb and J. B. Wright, eds, The James Stuart Archive, 4 vols., Pietermaritzburg, 1976–86, the 'beetle' story did exist before Bryant's popularisation of it (vol. 1, 179); but cf. vol. 1, 5, 188; vol.2, 230, 246; vol.4, 198, 202, 213, 202. Cetshwayo asserted in 1880 that Shaka meant 'bastard', C. de B. Webb and J.B. Wright, A Zulu King Speaks, Pietermaritzburg 1987, 3 and 3n.
10.H. Stuart, unpubl. play 'Shaka', first performed at the Foundation Theatre, Durban, 7 July 1981, with Henry Cele as Shaka; ms. in Killie Campbell Africana Library, Durban, James Stuart Collection, 38. Hall, Shaka: Warrior King of the Zulu, 2.
11.C. Ballard, The House of Shaka, Durban, 1988, 15. Cf. J.L. Döhne, A Zulu-Kafir Dictionary, Cape Town, 1851, xiv (this etymology is supported by nothing in the body of the dictionary); Holden, The Past and Future of the Kaffir Races, 9.
12.Ballard, The House of Shaka, 16.
13.I have dealt in more detail with some of the 'diachronic' gestures in a revised 1990 Natal History Workshop paper, 'Textual Incest: Nathaniel Isaacs and the Development of the Shaka Myth', History in Africa, 19 (1992), 411–33.
14.D.J. Darlow, Tshaka: King of the Amazulu, Lovedale, 1937, 40–1.
15.Isaacs, Travels and Adventures, vol. 1, 269.
16.Holden, The Past and Future of the Kaffir Races, 25.
17.N. McMenemy, Assegai!, London, 1973, 62, 66.
18.G. Cory, The Rise of South Africa, vol.2, London, 1913, 230.
19.E. Walker, A History of Southern Africa, London, 1928, 182; Omer-Cooper, The Zulu Aftermath, 2.
20.Omer-Cooper, The Zulu Aftermath, 6.
21.T.R.H. Davenport, South Africa: A Modern History, 3rd ed., Johannesburg, 1987, 15.
22.Ballard, The House of Shaka, 16.
23.Omer-Cooper, The Zulu Aftermath, 3–4, 41.
24.E.P. Watt, Febana, London, 1962, 128.
25.L.M. Thompson, A History of South Africa, New Haven and Sandton, 1990, 83–86.
26.Watt, Febana, 130.
27.Isaacs, Travels and Adventures, vol. 1, 281.
28.A.T. Bryant, A Zulu-English Dictionary, Pinetown, 1905,49; Bryant, OldenTimes, 532; A. T. Bryant, A History of the Zulu and Neighbouring Tribes, Cape Town, 1964, 98.
29.S.R.J. Martin, 'British Images of the Zulu c.1820–1879', Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 1982, 51.
30.Isaacs, Travels and Adventures, vol.1, 269.
31.Isaacs, Travels and Adventures, vol. 1, 266.
32.Holden, The Past and Future of the Kaffir Races, 9.
33.Holden, The Past and Future of the Kaffir Races, 23.
34.G.M. Theal, History of South Africa from 1795 to 1872, vol. 1, London, 1915, 438.
35.E.H. Brookes and C. de B. Webb, A History of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 1965, 8.
36.Quoted in D. Hammond and A. Jablow, The Africa that Never Was: Four Centuries of British Writing about Africa, New York, 1970, 107.
37.Bryant, Olden Times, 156.
38.Bryant, Olden Times, 219.
39.Brookes and Webb, A History of Natal, 11–13.
40.McMenemy, Assegai!, 73.
41.J.M. Coetzee, White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa,